www.elsblog.org - Bringing Data and Methods to Our Legal Madness

01 June 2009

Methodological Advances and Empirical Legal Scholarship

I received an email from the Executive Editor of Columbia Law Review's
online supplement, Sidebar.She wrote let us know of a publication of a piece which may be of interest to
readers of the Empirical Legal Studies blog. She writes:

"The piece responds to an article by Professors Cox and
Miles on the effect of judicial race and ideology on findings of liability in
voting rights cases.In their response
Professors Staudt and VanderWeele argue that because Cox and Miles failed to
investigate the possibility of dependencies between the variables they were
studying their results may be biased. Staudt and VanderWeele develop an
alternative approach for exploring the effects of judicial attributes on voting
using causal directed acyclic graphs. They suggest this methodology can help
empirical researchers investigate the relationships between variables in order
to posit statistical models with appropriate controls and to identify true
cause and effect relationships when they exist. While this methodology has
become popular in a number of disciplines—including statistics, biostatistics,
epidemiology, and computer science—and is widely believed to be a valuable tool
for empirical research, it has yet to appear in the empirical law literature.
Staudt and VanderWeele offer a brief introduction of the method in order to
initiate discussion as to its worth in empirical legal studies.

I hope that you will find this piece interesting, and
that you will consider linking to it on your blog. I have included a citation
and the full link for the online version of the response below.The piece is also available in a citable PDF
version, which can be accessed through a link at the bottom of the response.
The piece is also currently featured on the Columbia Law Review home page at http://www.columbialawreview.org."